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Project Management vs QA Lead [like a 'Man v Food' thing]

Project Management Team vs QA Lead

Over the course of software development, who’s the true champion in making sure your solution is being built correctly: your project management team or your QA lead? Let's take a closer look.

Defining Roles

The project management team[1] takes on one of the most fundamental roles in software development, facilitating the process and overseeing its scope. The importance of defining your project’s scope can’t be overstated: By understanding exactly what work needs to be completed in order to get your product ready to ship, the project management team can establish scheduling, create a process and ensure that the development is being executed.

The QA lead[2], on the other hand, is responsible for making sure your deliverable is a quality product. This means checking on some of the software development processes, ensuring corners aren’t being cut in order to get the product ready for market. QA leads execute test cases and scripts to demonstrate software functionality and identify bugs, missing features or other issues related to the user experience.

Which Role Wins?

Both roles are essential: Project managers see to it that development work gets carried out, and the QA leads make sure the work gets done correctly. However, it's easy to see how both roles can lead to conflict. And depending on the needs of an organization, it’s not necessarily clear who the winner would be. QA leads can catch issues that end up expanding the scope of development, costing the project management team valuable resources. On the other hand, QA leads can nitpick to the point of slowing down a functional product’s development significantly.

But in an ideal scenario, they’re both winners, coming together in a DevOps scenario[3] to ensure software is built and tested together. Proper quality assurance and product management should work in tandem throughout each development cycle’s sprint, ensuring management and QA testing is automatically built into the process.

Working Together

Agile teams and IT operations work together through a sharing mindset that helps speed up the process by removing silos and encouraging transparency. Speed is enhanced through the use of automation tools that make developing and QA testing faster than ever before. By making the project accountable to the entire team, developers have a better process to ensure products are feature-complete, bug-free and ready to hit the market.

When building software using a DevOps team[4], the true winner between project management and the QA lead is the product itself.